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24 September 2010

Wikileaks, the Human Terrain System, and Anthropological Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan

The following are articles written specifically about data contained in the Afghan War Diary released by Wikileaks, in connection with the U.S. Army's Human Terrain System and its deployment of anthropologists and other social scientists in counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. The results are mixed, but what was revealed was also very novel and damning. In the meantime, the two top directors of HTS, Col. Steve Fondacaro, and anthropologist Montgomery McFate have been forced to resign from the program.

Revealing the Human Terrain System in Wikileaks’ Afghan War DiaryThis article presents evidence showing that HTS conducted internal spying of its own fieldworkers in order to gain access to their confidential fieldnotes, and passing them on to military intelligence, as appears in the records. We begin by asking a few questions: When a Human Terrain Team (HTT) is mentioned in the records leaked to Wikileaks, how does the report writer know what he or she knows about the HTT? The answer seems simple enough, in a number of instances: a HTT is embedded with a larger military unit, the report writer indicates where the HTT is, what it is doing at a given moment, and what it plans to do. As for what HTTs themselves report, none of these records are HTT reports. Their reports go elsewhere and have an altogether different form. So when a record indicates what was recorded by a member or members of a HTT, how does the report writer know that, and who are these report writers?

This is the archive of what was formerly the webpage of AJP. It now consists entirely of the essays and posts published by AJP founder, Maximilian C. Forte, associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, at Concordia University in Montreal (maximilian.forte@concordia.ca). AJP was a Canadian organization for anthropologists interested in supporting struggles for self-determination, decolonizing knowledge production, and resisting the corporatization and militarization of the academy.